Gardens of Hell examines the human side of one of the great tragedies of modern warfare, the Gallipoli campaign of the First World War. In February 1915, beginning with a naval attack on Turkey in the Dardanelles, a combined force of British, Australian, New Zealand, Indian, and French troops invaded the Gallipoli Peninsula only to face crushing losses and an ignominious retreat from what seemed a hopeless mission. Both sides in the battle suffered huge casualties, with a combined 127,000 servicemen killed during the action. Patrick Gariepy has pieced together the battle from combatantsÆ own words. Drawn from diaries and letters and from stories passed down through generations of families, these firsthand accounts offer an honest, heartfelt, and sometimes painful testimony to a doomed campaign fought by the men who lived through the fury, terror, and grief that was Gallipoli. Gardens of Hell is a sensitive acknowledgment of the enormous human cost of military folly and failure.

Britain and the Ocean Road uses new firsthand research and unconventional interpretations to take a fresh look at British maritime history in the age of sail. The human stories of eight shipwrecks serve as waypoints on the voyage, as the book explores how and why Britain became a global sea power. Each chapter has people at its heart – sailors, seafaring families, passengers, merchants, pirates, explorers, and many others. The narrative encompasses an extraordinary range of people, ships and events, such as a bloody maritime civil war in the 13th century, a 17th-century American teenager who stepped from one ship to another - and into a life of piracy, a British warship that fought at Trafalgar (on the French side), and the floating hell of a Liverpool slave-ship, sunk in the year before the slave trade was abolished. The book is full of surprising details and scenes, including England’s rudest and crudest streetname, what it was like to be a passenger in a medieval ship (take a guess), how a fragment of the English theatre reached the Far East during Shakespeare’s lifetime, who forgave who after a deadly pirate duel, why there were fancy dress parties in the Arctic, and where you could get the best herring. Britain and the Ocean Road is the first of two works aimed at introducing a general audience to the gripping (and at times horrifying) story of Britain, its people and the sea. The books will also interest historians and archaeologists, as they are based on original scholarship. The second book, Black Oil on the Waters, will take the story from the age of steam to the 21st century.

The pixies are the faery folk of the South West of England, by which I mean Cornwall, Devon and the western part of Somerset (essentially Exmoor, the Quantocks and the Blackdown Hills). Beyond this area, moving into northern and eastern Somerset and into Dorset, it is far more common to speak of fairies. Pixies came to wider attention through the work of a handful of authors. Before that, they had been well-known within the south-west, and local people had speculated about their origins over centuries.

This book pulls together everything we know about how things work in Faery. The information is scattered across many narratives, but once it is assembled, we discover we have a detailed picture of their politics and economy. Much of this is entirely independent of human affairs. References from old books and oral traditions as well as the authors personal knowledge combine to make this a comprehensive work.

The Garden History of Devon is a reference guide to historical sources for over 200 Devon gardens. It also provides an introduction for would-be garden historians on how to conduct garden research. The book is the result of an exploration of the archival resources of Devon's garden history; the objective being to provide signposts to research material for those interested in the development of Devon's gardens. The entries, arranged alphabetically, begin with a brief section describing each garden's history, amplified by quotations from contemporary travellers and diarists; following the descriptive sections are listings of documents, printed sources and illustrations relating to each garden. The greater part of this material is unknown to garden historians.